Spam is up, big time. Market reporters say spam has increased as much as 59% in the past two months and 120% from last year. We’ve noticed and we are sure you have too. So we put our heads together and came up with a solution to protect all of our email services, from Backup MX to POP3, included at no extra charge. It’s called Anti-spam Policies and this is how it works.

Log into No-IP.com and click on Mail in the left-hand navigation. Then click Modify for your domain, followed by Anti-spam Policies. You will be presented with a grid of policies on the left and presets across the top. To start, everyone has the “Minimal” setting, equivalent to our previous protection. This includes the No-IP.com custom blacklist, SpamCop, sender validation, and now greylisting(!). Other policies include the venerable Spamhaus.org SBL-XBL, SORBS, dsbl, ORDB and the Bogus MX list from RFC-Ignorant.org.

Probably the most exciting addition is greylisting. Basically, greylisting perform tests to make sure the message is coming from a real mail server and not an infected machine or spam operation. You can read more about greylisting in our guides. Currently, greylisting is in a training mode. On December 4th we will turn it on for all policies that use it.

We recommend you step up your protection to “Moderate.” I personally have been using the “Moderate” setting for three weeks on my account and have seen my amount of spam cut by 75%. Previously I was receiving about 65 spam emails per day. Now I get around 15 per day. And I haven’t had a single complaint from my friends, family, or business associates! When greylisting goes full-bore, I expect to have days where not a single spam message reaches my inbox.

And remember, this is for ALL email services, Forwarding and POP3, Reflector and Backup MX. So take a look, even if you don’t plan on changing anything. Someday you may need to!